Joe Shearer
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This is exactly like asking, "How wet can a day get?"
It can get very wet; it can stay absolutely dry. Both are possible.
For much of what follows, I seek a caveat from objections by Bang Galore and Rig Vedic. It is difficult to write coherently while keeping the differing versions of the linguists' war in mind, and this account is based on the older theories and narration.
The underlying grammatical form of Urdu is derived from a version of Prakrit. Pakistanis and Indians below the age of 40 are requested to skip the following two paragraphs.
The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is often misunderstood and misrepresented; Prakrit is neither a descendant nor a derivative of Classical Sanskrit, the codified language that emerged after Panini's work with it. Prakrit existed even as Panini proceeded to codify the original Indo-Aryan which went back to a much older language, the language of the Rg Veda, which was cognate with Avestan.
Put simply, Prakrit is what people actually spoke, in Panini's time, while Sanskrit is the distilled version of the root language from which Prakrit had evolved. Prakrit more or less means natural, Sanskrit more or less means polished, indicating the degree of regimentation that each version suffered. Sanskrit was used in immaculate and unalterable form by the Brahmin orthodoxy, who imposed their own unitary version of orthodoxy using it. Prakrit, on the other hand, evolved from Old Indo-Aryan, the language of the Vedas; it was the common speech, clearly akin to the artificial Sanskrit that Panini reduced to its pure form from the available versions and usages, including usages of the original Old Indo-Aryan. Panini's Sanskrit actually removed certain forms and uses that are to be found in Old Indo-Aryan, and is therefore in some ways a distillation of the older language to a theoretically stricter form, but an historically anachronistic one - no such thing as Classical Sanskrit was spoken by the people who composed the Vedas, it was the theoretically purified version of their speech.
Urdu uses only the grammar of this 'Prakrit', the rules that determine how sentences are composed, where the verb goes, how other parts of speech connect to it and are themselves modified, and so on. This grammar is not Sanskrit grammar, but is the grammar common to all languages derived from this middle language, Sauraseni Prakrit.
On that grammatical skeleton, a speaker may string whatever nouns and adjectives and adverbs strike his or her fancy, and a few unusual verbs as well, though verbs tend to be the original Prakrit verbs, by and large.
There is nothing called a pure Urdu, any more than there can be something called a perfectly dry wine. There can be highly Sanskritised (not Prakritised) Urdu at one end, which is nothing but Hindi, or an extremely exotic version with no nouns of Sanskrit origin whatsoever, which some might fancy represents their ideal of Urdu. That is a subjective opinion, and might well be true, but has no connection with grammar or linguistics.
